


Not Just The Heart Of The Home

by Laliandra



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Special Feelings Cookies, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-11
Updated: 2015-03-11
Packaged: 2018-03-17 08:00:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3521585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laliandra/pseuds/Laliandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So, forever ago Penny asked for "Jack baking for the team because they are his best love" and obviously that is ENTIRELY MY JAM and I meant to have this done for Valentines but... Anyway. Cookies of late but unrepentant sweetness for those we love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Just The Heart Of The Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pennyplainknits](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pennyplainknits/gifts).



  
  
  


In the end they have to drag Shitty off of the lacrosse frat’s lawn still yelling about “society’s arbitrary judgment of our worth as humans” and “the damaging effects of a romantic-centric narrative” while the idiot who'd chirped them about not having Valentines tried to hide behind a lawn chair.

 

“I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying, you coulda left it at ‘we had a game’,” Rans points out, adding another brick to the Monolith To Failed Capitalism, aka the stack of half price candy boxes that now dominates the kitchen table. Shitty takes a breath but Holster lobs half a truffle at his head and says, “What he means to say is, bro, we agreed no fighting with the fratties during final semester.”

 

“We would’ve totally had your back in a fight though!” says Chowder, with what Eric worries is his actual game face on. “Also I had a date,” he rushes out, like it’s all one word and one he couldn’t not say.

 

Lardo pats him on the shoulder. “And we are proud as fuck. Obviously. We lay out small offerings to the gods to thank them for this miracle. But the rest of us escaped without having to shell out our dollars for sweets for our sweets and sugar for our honeys. Or whatever Bittle would’ve baked.”

 

“Homemade gifts are always the best,” Eric says, mostly by rote at this point. He’s done Valentines gifting ideas on the vlog every year, even though this year the comments were mostly full of people asking if he was going to make them for his straight boy. The ahahahaha that’s not even really a thing any mores he’d left in reply had not sounded that convincing even to him.

 

He looks, as he always does, as he has mostly given up trying not to, at Jack. Jack smiles, camera flash sudden, and then looks down again at his hands, fiddling open his candy wrapper. Eric watches him struggle for a moment, then another, then takes it with a sigh. He opens it looking at Jack, not at the wrapper, with his very best faceoff smile, and Jack is staring. And... oh dear, someone has definitely asked one of them a question.

 

“Makes sense really, Bits thinks that Jack’s valentine would be hockey, right?” Shitty, their man bunned saviour, says into the waiting silence.

 

Eric tries to remember if he actually said that or if he just tweeted it, which would be a direct violation of the weird truce they have where they pretend that no one knows what his twitter handle is. Whatever. The only thing that’s really important right now is that he is triumphant in the wrapper opening one-on-one, and that he doesn’t have to admit to zoning out of another conversation because of Jack Zimmerman’s damn face.

 

"We all know true love when we see it," he says.

 

Shitty grins at him in a disturbingly omnipotent way. "So, Jack, it fits that the Samwell Hockey Team was your date."

 

So. There’s maybe one other important thing, that it was a mutual zoning, but that gets boxed away for now until Eric has the mental space to unpack... all of that.

 

Jack says, "I was kind of crappy date, guys, sorry."

 

Eric rolls his eyes. He doesn’t know what Jack would think of as an adequate gesture of hockey-ly affection, probably a shut out where he somehow managed to play every minute and got everyone a goal, even Chowder.

 

Under the chorus of fond abuse that always greets Jack’s ‘aw, shucks’ tendencies, Eric hands back the chocolate.

 

*

 

They don’t actually have assignments for Food Class yet, so Jack herding Eric out of the door muttering something about a Stop and Shop run for ingredients is unexpected, and made even weirder by Jack looking around them like he thinks they’re under surveillance.

 

After Jack’s fifth nervous sweep of their surroundings Eric stops on the sidewalk and says, shielding his mouth with his hand, “What is it? Did the mob finally catch up to your secret identity?” He doesn't think it's anything serious. Of Jack thought there were paparazzi in the bushes he'd never let them know they'd got to him. And there's no way Eric will ever forget what Jack looks like when he's truly scared.

 

Jack had stopped walking as soon as Eric had, but he makes a face like he doesn’t know how he’s got here. Possibly he doesn’t. “Did Rans put Inception on while we slept again and you can't shake the feeling that the projections are out to get you?” Jack at least seems to know what he's talking about - they’ve all been there - and shakes his head. “Okay, so, what’s with the constant vigilance thing? Surely Jack Zimmerman, defender of the haus, isn’t worried about the lacrosse frat coming after us for revenge.”

 

Jack snorts out a laugh, and he relaxes a little into Eric’s side. "Those netstick losers are all talk and no trousers." Eric sometimes worries that all Jack's old man hobbies are aging him prematurely.

 

Eric nudges him. "So?"

 

The side of Jack's mouth curls up in a way that would probably not be attractive on other people. He says, "I know that it was kind of a joke about the team being, you know, but you've all been so...  definitely deserve ... And you said homemade is best so I thought. Yeah. Cookies."

 

"Sometimes it's like talking to someone on a really bad cell plan," Eric tells him. "Wait, oh my gosh, are you really going to make the team a Valentine's present?"

 

Jack frowns then says, "Oh, bad reception." He nods. "It doesn't have to a be a big -"

 

"Go big or go home, Zimmerman," Eric interrupts, in his best impression of Coach Hall.

 

Jack throws up his hands in a gesture of defeat that is nothing like when he's actually been beaten.

 

They end up back in the kitchen with Eric pulling out his heart shaped cookie cutter and Jack mixing red food colouring, and Eric doesn't know when it became some weird variant of Meaningful Gesture Chicken but here they are. It's not exactly hard to get press Jack's buttons of competitiveness. Jack basically is a button of competitiveness. Eric laughs under his breath.

 

"Bittle, I'm sieving just fine," Jack tells him comfortably , bumping Eric with his hip. "I have my own technique."

 

Eric pushes back a little and says, "Sure, that constant dust cloud is all part of your method."

 

He'd not really been sure what it would be like having someone bake with him, letting Jack into the safe bubble of his kitchen. It's not just the heart of the home. He still bakes with Mom and Meemaw but pretty much as soon as he was old enough to be trusted to turn on the gas it'd just been Eric and the vision of what he could make happen.

 

But Jack fits in like Eric had really not been expecting. Eric thinks that maybe Jack feels it too, the quiet comfort of stepping through the door and setting your ingredients out and knowing that the worst that can happen is that you’ve wasted some flour and an egg or two. Jack is so easy here, falls into conversations easily, the rhythm of their back and forth over the whirr of the beater. Eric likes looking up from his work and seeing Jack here, even when the sunlight catches him soft edged and smiling and it makes Eric’s whole body seize up in a moment of pure exasperated wanting. He’d expected this with Lardo, who sits at the table while he bakes and does her own thing, sketching out her thoughts in the air or onto paper or one time in shapes in flour on the table, and with Shitty, who is about as terrible at following a recipe as you’d expect.

 

There’s really nothing about Jack that Eric was expecting - apart from maybe the superstitions - but the way he has stepped so easily into something so fundamental to Eric, and hardly disrupted or changed it at all, is possibly the most... well. Just the very most.  

 

It’s Eric’s life, nothing different, only now when he looks up there is a boy smiling at him, fond, and asking him, “Do you think this is red enough?”

 

“Well, you’ll struggle to get the actual fine maroon of our fine establishment. And our less fine jerseys. So it’s really up to you. Don’t forget to taste.”

 

Jack diligently dips one finger into the bowl of frosting and Eric curses himself for a fool. He knocks Jack with his elbow before any licking can occur and says, “You could always leave it pink.”

 

Jack looks down at the bowl like he’s seriously considering it. There’s a small smile just visible at one edge of his mouth, crushingly earnest. He says, “Nah. It’s not about any Valentines crap, really, it’s about... It’s about this team, and how... and that you’ve taught me to love hockey again in a way that I can actually do.”

 

It happens more often than not when it’s just the two of them hanging out and baking, something held close to the chest slipping free.

 

"Jack," Eric says, slightly at a loss with how glad  he is. Jack laughs more at the rink , even when people talk about playoffs, they've all noticed it, but it's another thing to hear it said. "I'm so pleased."

 

They stand grinning at each other for several moments that spin out sweet like spun sugar. Then Jack lifts the spoon out of the mixing bowl and says something about consistency with a frown, but the moment doesn't feel broken, exactly.

 

"I want the cookies to be -" he says a collection of vowel sounds that Eric wouldn't have thought could possibly be a word before this prolonged exposure to Jack Laurent.

 

He looks at Eric expectantly like Eric should be following the play. Eric says, "Yeah, no, I got nothing."

 

"Squishy?" Jack says consideringly. "Goopy?" He makes sort of squashing gesture with his hands.

 

"I don't think that's what you're going for, judging by tone of voice." Eric considers the way Jack's mouth had shaped the word like he was tasting it. "Melt in the mouth?"

 

Jack nods assent, easy as, and so Eric rummages around in his box for the recipe for softer sugar cookies than he usually makes, and they get to work.

 

Some of the hearts come out better than others, because Betsy is an old girl and Jack doesn’t always cream the butter and sugar enough, offensemen, so impatient.

 

Jack carefully sets one of the more perfect ones aside as he ices. Possibly he has baking superstitions also, Eric wouldn’t be at all surprised. The Haus rumbles back into life as people return from classes or in Nursey’s case actually make it out of bed and Eric tightens his grip on his icing bag. He’s had to make the frogs scrape icing off the ceiling on multiple occasions and he doesn’t want anything to mess up Jack’s cookies. He’s doing the heart outlines and passing them along to Jack to do whatever detail he feels. Now that Eric looks he sees that their jersey numbers have been painstakingly iced onto a cookie each, and he feels his whole face go completely and utterly fond.

 

Dex, Shitty and Chowder crowd around them, jostling to get a look at the counters, and a sort of awed hush descends over the kitchen. Then Shitty says, “I’m totally going to get some smooth jams to put on while we eat these, brb.” He pulls out the vowels in the last ‘b’.

 

The frogs are already warming up into what they will later refer to as a fight, Eric knows, but what is going to end up with nothing more than some slapped hands and maybe an elbow or two. Any moment now someone is going to threaten to eat someone else. Eric sighs and turns back to look at Jack, worried a little but it’s fine, it’s good, Jack is smiling at the team he loves; this team of children and endless chirping and no manners to speak of at all.

 

Jack doesn’t look up when he slides the number 15 cookie along the countertop to Eric.

 

Eric picks it up. “Hey,” he says quietly. “This is the best one. Why doesn’t it have number 1 piped on there?”

 

“Because it’s for you,” Jack says firmly. “You would have given me the best one, and I’m trying... Generosity might not come as easy to me as it does to you but I know what I’m about.” He’s using his captain voice, which Eric is sure he must know is dirty pool.

 

Well, fine then, Eric is not going to argue if Jack wants to use his earnest voice and his special feelings cookies just to make a gesture for Eric. Not even a little.

 

“One second.” He dashes a quick #1 onto the nearest cookie and hands it to Jack. “A toast?” he says, holding his own cookie out.

 

Jack pauses, wipes some confectioner’s sugar off of his nose, and then taps his number to Eric’s. “Here’s to homemade,” he says, and the emphasis is very much on the home.

 

Eric laughs, loud, and takes a bite.

  
  



End file.
